The Morphological Status of Accent 2 in North Germanic Simplex Forms

The issue of markedness of tonal accents in North Germanic (most Swedish and Norwegian dialects) has never been settled. For a long time, it looked like there was reasonable agreement that the distinction was privative and that it was accent 2 that was marked, accent 1 representing default intonation (Sweet, 1877:155, Elert, 1964:197, Haugen, 1967, Kristoffersen, 1993, Riad, 1998). Recently – and radically – one dissertation and a series of articles instead argue that it is accent 1 that is marked, while accent 2 is the default in words of the relevant shape (Lahiri, Wetterlin & Jönsson-Steiner, 2005, 2006, Wetterlin, 2007). These are opposing views reached by people working within what is by and large the same general paradigm. How does that come to pass? The answer lies, it seems, in what expectations people ascribe to the notion of markedness, in particular whether representation is taken to be tied to markedness or not. For instance, the celebrated dissertation of Gösta Bruce (1977) proposed that the representation of the tonal accents was equipollent, that is, both accents contained a lexical part, manifested as an initial fall (HL). The difference was one of alignment of that fall to the stressed syllable, giving rise to the contrast (HL* vs. H*L). At the same time, Bruce clearly maintains that there is an asymmetry in that accent 2 is marked and accent 1 is unmarked (Bruce 1998). Unmarked accent 1 shows up in unintegrated borrowings (tango, bandy), and in the foreign accents of Swedish and Norwegian speakers. Thus, one could say that this account of the accents separates representation (equipollent) from markedness (asymmetric). Lahiri et al. (2005) have a similar view, but with the roles differently distributed. The marked member of the opposition is, in their view, accent 1 and the type of indicators of this marked status include exceptionality. What is exceptional, and that would include unintegrated loans, is also more likely marked. The marked feature is phonologically active and they capture that by claiming that accent 1 dominates, when lexically specified. While they acknowledge the fact that accent 2 is often tonally more contentful, they consider this a representational fact that has no